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User-Agent: Mozilla/4.77 [en] (X11; U; Linux 2.4.3-12smp i686)
Description of problem:
It appears as if mkinitrd-3.2.6-1 won't build a usable initrd for the
2.2.19-7.0.8 kernel.
Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable):
3.2.6-1
How reproducible:
Always
Steps to Reproduce:
- Upgrade mkinitrd to 3.2.6-1
- Install 2.2.19-7.0.8 kernel rpm. Build initrd.
- Reboot into 2.2.19. Boot fails at pivot_root:
pivotroot: pivot_root(/sysroot,/sysroot/initrd) failed: 38
- Downgrade to mkinitrd-2.6-1 and retry.
- Everything's hunky-dory.
Additional info:
Here is some additional puzzling info. Mkinitrd-3.2.6-1 works fine for me
with 2.2.16-22 and all the 2.4.x kernels I tried. So, it is just the
2.2.19 based errata kernel that flunks.
I don't think this is a major problem. The only people who will get caught
are those who do a clean install of 7.2 and then want to install the 7.0
errata kernel.

We got hit by this too.
IMO, it is important to be able to provide backward-compatibility via a switch
or something,
because there will be valid reasons for installing 2.2. w/ initrd on RHL7[12]
systems; IMO, this
is much better than having to install RHL7 if you want to play with 2.2.
So raising severity.

The problem IMO is that mkinitrd only supports 2.4.x pivot-root mechanism,
the old one used for 2.2 is no longer supported.
Pivot-root isn't implemented for 2.2...
(I think bmatthews made some accident there, I would be very suprised if new
mkinitrd works with 2.2.16-22)

I just added --nopivot to mkinitrd, which skips the pivot stuff. This should
result in initrd's that work just like the ones from old versions.
*Please* test this change; I don't have any machines I can test this on very
easily. You can get the sources from:
ftp://people.redhat.com/pub/ewt/mkinitrd-3.3.12.tar.bz2
report back here if it works.

I tested this by installing latest errata kernel from 7.0 on a 7.2 system. The
system had root-raid so
initrd was necessary.
With --nopivot, it worked nicely, thanks!
Two additional notes:
1) new mkinitrd conflicts with older kernels' /sbin/install-kernel; no problem.
2) mkinitrd must BuildPreReq dietlibc :-)